Section Four
Quality and Equality of Learning

Overview
This section explores how technology affects the nature of the teaching and learning process in terms of two closely linked concepts, quality and equality of learning.

Quality, here, is considered in reference to more holistic approaches to learning, including those developed by feminist educators and by practitioners in adult and in distance education. Equality of learning entails looking at whether particular strategies or technologies favor some types of learners more than others, and whether disparities result from intrinsic characteristics of a technology or from choices about approaches and applications.

Perspectives on Learning
Within the broad range of theories about learning, two opposing perspectives are most relevant to this discussion. Ursula Franklin describes these perspectives as the difference between production models and growth models. Production models are based on discrete, controllable processes and outcomes whereas growth models describe more spontaneous processes emerging from the dynamics of human interaction. She notes, "If ever there was a growth process, if ever there was a holistic process, a process that cannot be divided into rigid predetermined steps, it is education."¹

The perspectives used to consider quality and equality in this paper are based on growth models of learning, including feminist perspectives and viewpoints emerging from adult and distance education. Holistic approaches are particularly relevant in considering to what extent new technologies support a full range of approaches to teaching and learning and accommodate different types of learning and differences based on context and community.

Feminist Perspectives
There is a long tradition of philosophical and psychological speculation about differences between men and women's ways of perceiving and understanding the world. Recent concepts are concerned more with gender (the socially framed concept that shapes the different life experiences of women and men) than with sex specific differences related to physiology. What has been termed "women's ways of knowing" has been at the core of an educational discussion for the past 15 years, since the 1982 publication of Carol Gilligan's In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. In Gilligan's terms, gender-related ways of approaching the world result from:
the wish (of men) to be alone at the top and the consequent fear that others will get too close: the wish (of women) to be at the centre of connection and the consequent fear of being too far out on the edge. These disparate fears of being stranded and being caught give rise to different portrayals of achievement and affiliation, leading to different modes of action and different ways of assessing the consequences of choice.²

Different ways of viewing the world affect how people learn. It has been suggested that the more socially- oriented framework of women's lives fosters a more cooperative approach to learning which values discussion, shared experience, and the opportunity to relate new learning to one's own life and experience.

Adult and Distance Education Perspectives
Many who work in the fields of adult and distance education support egalitarian approaches to learning that respect the learners' experience and allow for integration of learning and life experience. Dorothy MacKeracher refers to the intrinsic drives to human action as: competence (the skills, knowledge and attitudes to operate independently) and connectedness (the sense of belonging in rewarding relationships).³ Aboriginal educators also value approaches that provide for continuity between learning and life and that support social learning strategies based on community values.